Monthly Archives: March 2014

What is Sharepoint?

Microsoft SharePoint is an extensible platform that provides a range of products that can help organizations with solution for a variety of business needs. Primarily, SharePoint was introduced as an Enterprise Content Management System later on Web Publishing, Collaboration, Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) features were introduced through a variety of ways.

Version History

The current version of the product is SharePoint 2013 but if we look into version History, it will be as follows:

SharePoint Basics

New and exciting tools were added to SharePoint platform with every new version but core of the tools that makes SharePoint an outstanding platform for content management, collaboration, Business Process Management and web publishing are:

SharePoint Sites

SharePoint Communities

Contents

Search

Insights

Composition

Sites
SharePoint facilitates to create websites. Different Site Templates are available in SharePoint to create website of a specific type like Personal site, a Team Site, a social media site, a blogs or a Wiki Site etc.

Communities
As collaboration is a key feature ofSharePoint, so it helps to work with other people more effectively in an organization by providing a forum experience inSharePoint environment.Contents
Initially, SharePoint was introduced as an Enterprise Content Management System, so it acts as repository to put all contents within an enterprise.

Search
As we know that SharePoint is an Enterprise Content Management System so searching the content efficiently and effectively becomes an important and key requirement. SharePoint search engine provides smart searching of whole Enterprise contents.

Insights
In order to extract information from different data sources including dashboards, reports etc, SharePoint has introduced Insights. SharePoint Insights brings all information together in more understandable way.

Composition
SharePoint is a feature-rich plate form but still extensible. We can extend the capabilities of SharePoint using different tools like SharePoint Designer to meet more complex scenarios.

Hopefully, this SharePoint for Dummies article gives a basic overview of SharePoint environment, features and versions. Much more to come on this blog soon.